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Advent of Code 2018
- mathgeek 8y agoDiscussion from last year's AoC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15813318
- jeroenheijmans 8y agoThe 2017 edition was the first time I participated, and I severely underestimated how much fun it would be! Am participating (and to a much lesser degree competing) again this year :D
- jordigh 8y agoHere is my blog post for when I did this in D: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/
- aestetix 8y agoIs it really that hard to provide an email based login?
- dickeytk 8y agoask for a refund
- biggerfisch 8y agoI mean, it is additional work. Not only do you need to store the emails/passwords securely, which while it isn't _that_ hard, it is a needed consideration, but you also need to now: - provide a password reset service - find a way to send emails to this many people for low cost, it is a free service after all, so all of the confirmation/reset emails are an additional cost - etc
- lucasverra 8y agoon the cost side (not counting gdpr), back4app (parse server plateform [1] as a service) provide all of that from scratch. disclaimer : just a paying client here. [1]: https://www.back4app.com/product/what-is-parse-server https://www.back4app.com/product/what-is-parse-server
- jaaames 8y agoFirebase has ergonomic free auth that does all this out of the box.
- znpy 8y agoIt would be cool if auth0 (https://auth0.com/ https://auth0.com/) would offer free usage of their service, given the fact that they would only use basic features.
- acheron 8y agoWhat I wonder is why can't I just create an arbitrary username unlinked to email or anything else? This isn't a bank account we're talking about. Oh right, because they're probably gathering personal information, which is why they want access to my Google or other accounts. I guess since they appear to have a "reddit" auth option and I think reddit still lets you create arbitrary usernames, that would be a two step process to do it.
- dickeytk 8y agothat's such a baseless accusation. I think it's more likely Eric just wanted to spend his time working on the problems and not setting up password resets and building forms.
- hashhar 8y agoOnec you implement your own Auth you are liable for the all the risks storing personal information comes with. And accusing someone of storing personal data without any substance is something that I don't consider to be in the HN spirit.
- falcolas 8y agoIf you store an email, you're liable for GDPR controls, IIRC. Why expose yourself to that liability if you don't need to?
- abecedarius 8y agoIt'd be nice to have a no-login localstorage-based option. I guess you wouldn't get on the leaderboard, but does anything else need an identity?
- netcraft 8y agoI've participated in this the last couple years. It is really well done. The puzzles get progressively harder as the month goes on. I usually try to use a language im interested in but don't have a lot of experience with, but thats even more of a challenge and generally by the 15th or 20th im struggling to find enough time to complete the puzzles, but I try to go back and finish everything eventually. Always learn something new; theyre generally problems different from what I work on day to day.
- keithnz 8y agothis is what I like to do too.... it's quite nice for learning languages. Not quite sure what language I'm going to do this year though
- fells 8y agoExcited for this year's version. I did last year's event in OCaml which was a challenging, yet very rewarding experience. Still trying to decide what language to use this year.
- jaaames 8y agoI'm going to do Rust.
- sten 8y agoGonna try using rust this year as well. I have no background in rust at all so I'm a bit excited for the extra experience of trying a new language.
- itsme24543 8y agogonna give Rust a try also
- fells 8y agoYes, Rust is my other option I'm leaning towards. In process of learning it by building a ray tracer, so doing Advent of Code would be another way to get more familiar with it.
- Tinyyy 8y agoInteresting choice. What made you want to learn Ocaml?
- fells 8y agoAlways had been fascinated with functional programming, but kept stumbling with Haskell. Discovered the Real World OCaml [0] book and was instantly hooked. Sadly haven't been able to use it much outside of last year's Advent of Code and a toy ray tracer. [0] https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ https://dev.realworldocaml.org/
- snake117 8y ago
- ThorinJacobs 8y agoI'm really excited for this year's AoC, and trying to get other devs at my work involved too! Last year I tried to solve at least the first few days in a bunch of different languages, doing Red/Green TDD so I could learn how to set up a basic project and do tests in languages I was less familiar with. Still trying to decide if I should take that approach again this year or focus on getting every day done in a single new language.
- aczerepinski 8y agoThat's what I did too and my original plan was to use 25 different languages throughout the month. However as the puzzles got harder, I found there just wasn't enough time in the day. I'm sure the puzzles remain easy for some, but for me personally they got challenging even in the languages I already know.
- SnowingXIV 8y agoLooking forward to completing this year! Normally I'd grab ruby or js, but been filling gaps using C lately and tempted to keep pushing that.
- zephyrfalcon 8y agoI'm thinking of using Red this year, although it might not be ready, depending on what kinds of problems come up. Otherwise it will "just" be Prolog again. :)
- notjustanymike 8y agoForget the code challenges for a minute, and just look at that beautiful font and text-shadow combination on the logo.
- j1elo 8y agoTo be honest that website looks very bad to me. Fonts are too thin and that makes the text quite difficult to read. Much more than e.g. HN. And that's in my desktop PC, in mobile I went directly to close the tab. (Update) The "high contrast" CSS style they provide is more readable, but I'm sure it should be possible to create a dark style where readability doesn't suffer that much. That font is just not the best choice.
- xPaw 8y agoIt really is a thin font, I've pinged the author on Twitter a couple of days ago. https://twitter.com/thexpaw/status/1067699713745530883 https://twitter.com/thexpaw/status/1067699713745530883
- bhrgunatha 8y agoI use Stylus with a set of rules to increase contrast and change the font. Just changing the font (with default weight 400) has a huge effect on legibility. Stylus - https://add0n.com/stylus.html https://add0n.com/stylus.html
- dean177 8y agoI have been pretty interested in ReasonML / Ocaml lately, these puzzles are a great oppertunity to get to grips with the basics of a language.
- thangngoc89 8y agoShamelessly plug, I created a repository for storing solution written on Sketch.sh here: https://github.com/Sketch-sh/advent-of-code-2018 https://github.com/Sketch-sh/advent-of-code-2018
- rukuu001 8y agoHuh, that's cute :) I'm using AOC to learn Reason this year too
- timmorgan 8y agoI’ve been wanting to learn scheme. I think this would be a good opportunity! Question: should I go with Racket or Chicken Scheme?
- chickenfries 8y agoI'm considering doing Racket because it has a lot of good resources for people who aren't necessarily experts in Scheme.
- aczerepinski 8y agoI'm exited to dust off my Elixir skills. Jose Valim (creator of the language) is going to stream solutions on Twitch on a one-day lag.
- PopeDotNinja 8y agoIf you want to pair for fun, hit me up! I love Elixir, and it's probably my strongest language. Email in profile.
- rehemiau 8y agoAnnouncement link: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2018/11/lets-learn-elixir-together-with-advent-of-code/ http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2018/11/lets-learn-elixir-t...
- sfusato 8y agoThis is a really cool thing for Jose to do. It's a unique opportunity.
- luked22 8y agois there a way to get an email reminder to do the task every day?
- narimiran 8y agoLet writing an email reminder program be your Day 0 task for tomorrow ;)
- qubyte 8y agoI got a bit too invested in this last year. I even did a write up of one of the tasks. That year I did it all using JS since it's easy to write input parsers with it. This year I'll be doing it in Rust to stretch myself a little. https://qubyte.codes/blog/advent-of-code-2017-day-20-task-2 https://qubyte.codes/blog/advent-of-code-2017-day-20-task-2
- w4tson 8y agoDepending on your skills it may stretch you a lot. I did 2016 in rust and it was a battle, I knew relatively little beforehand. 2017 I solved in kotlin and got all the way to the end. I remember closing my laptop on Christmas Day and feeling elated/tired
- BooneJS 8y agoThe last few years I used Go, but I’d like to learn Rust. This seems like a good excuse to dabble in a new language.
- Insanity 8y agoI am going to use this year similarly, but with Go and Lisp instead of Python and Haskell :) It is such a fun way to pick up new langs
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- anthay 8y agoI did the AoC last year for the first time and was amazed how quickly some participants solved the puzzles, e.g. < 60 seconds. (I wrote about my experience here: http://howtowriteaprogram.blogspot.com/2017/12/advent-of-code-2017.html http://howtowriteaprogram.blogspot.com/2017/12/advent-of-cod...)
- Marazan 8y agoNever rule out people cheating. Solving it on one account then doing it again in another account
- has2k1 8y agoYou cannot cheat that way. It tracks time since the question became live.
- nneonneo 8y agoThat doesn't help - time is counted from midnight, so if you solve the problem on one account and then another, the second account will have a strictly worse time. About all it can really do is mess with the score distribution. Also, the input data for each problem is randomized per user, so you really do need a proper programmatic solution (i.e. simply copying another person's answer is unlikely to work).
- aczerepinski 8y agoYou could hurt other people's scores though right? Like if you and one other competitor traded wins on different days, but you had a second account that you posted the same solution to, your competitor would get third place on your winning days (and thus fewer points). (Please don't do this!)
- saagarjha 8y agoAside from the other responses mentioning why cheating wouldn’t work, I don’t think it’s out of the question that people can solve these that quickly. The “trick”, from my experience, has been to quickly skim the problem, extract useful information (which you can “learn” to do if you do it enough), and try to figure out how to solve the problem while you are writing boilerplate to set up the problem. Using Python or a similarly high-level language often helps.
- reaperducer 8y agoI dig the little Easter egg. I don't remember that in previous years.
- 333c 8y agoWhat's the Easter egg?
- pmulv 8y agoPeople have been interested in this in the past so I'll post it again: Peter Norvig's satisfying Jupyter notebook solutions from AoC 2016[0]. [0]http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Advent%20of%20Code.ipynb http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Advent%20...
- kbirkeland 8y agoHe also did one for 2017[0]. I imagine if he does this one it will end up in the same repo. [0] https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/master/ipynb/Advent%202017.ipynb https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/master/ipynb/Advent%2...
- mochtar 8y agoLast year I created a visualization of our private leaderboard [1], but that required same manual work to update the ranking each day. So for this year I've converted it to a browser extension, so it fetches the data automatically :) Available for both Firefox [2] and Chrome [3]. [1] https://github.com/amochtar/aoc-ranking https://github.com/amochtar/aoc-ranking [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aoc-ranking/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aoc-ranking/ [3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aoc-ranking/jbnlafikncgjjhdkmfhokcplgahebmjl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aoc-ranking/jbnlaf...
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- aquova 8y agoI vaguely remember hearing about this last year, and I'm really excited to try my hand at it this year. I initially taught myself Python doing daily coding challenges, but it's been over 4 years since I've done any. I'm debating trying my hand at learning a new language through this, possibly Nim or Rust, but we'll have to see if they start to get too tough.
- netcraft 8y agoWould be cool if they asked for information after you completed a puzzle for the day - scale of 10 how hard did you consider the puzzle, did you learn something new, what language did you use to complete it - would be super interesting data I bet.
- aleksei 8y agoCan you expound on that? What would you wish to know?
- netcraft 8y agoI think the three I mentioned would be a great place to start. - On a scale of 1-10, 1 being you could do it with your eyes closed, 10 being you thought it was nearly impossible, how difficult was this puzzle for you? - Did you learn something new because of this puzzle? Could be something about your language or a library or a new algorithm that helped you solve it. - What language(s) did you use to solve this puzzle? It could let you compare yourself with other developers - if you thought it was hard and most others didn't then you would know you might need to practice something more. It might be something that would best be combined with some profile level questions - like their experience level and primary languages that they use day to day. It could tell us that people who used python found this particular puzzle easy (maybe because of some built in function in the stdlib) but people using some other language didn't. Year over year it would be awesome to compare the languages that people use. Nobody is doing this for their job supposedly so these are either languages that people enjoy or find practical. I bet you'd find some correlations though too between language and how many puzzles they complete in a year - ie people using language x tend to finish the whole year but language y tend to drop off after day 10.
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- jawns 8y agoLooks like a cool project. I'm just curious about why this is billed as an Advent calendar, when really the only thing it has in common with an Advent calendar is that it terminates on Christmas. Is there anything about it that has anything to do with Advent, i.e. the Christian liturgical season that precedes Christmas?
- chrxr 8y agoIt's a pretty common thing to call something "Advent of x" or "x Advent calendar" nowadays, if it involves something happening once each day between 1st and 25th of December. For example: https://24ways.org/ https://24ways.org/ More here: https://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/advent-calendars-designers-developers-12125924 https://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/advent-calendars-des...
- lazzlazzlazz 8y agoWith an Advent calendar, you open a surprise, tiny gift every day of December until Christmas. With Advent of Code, you open a surprise, tiny code puzzle every day of December until Christmas.
- patrickdavey 8y agoLook at https://adventofcode.com/2015 https://adventofcode.com/2015 :) A lovely Christmas tree!
- j1elo 8y agoIf you participated in previous editions, how much time did you have to dedicate each day, on average? I've joined similar initiatives in the past, but I always end up giving up because of not being able to keep up the pace of sitting down _every_ day. Yeah one could just solve the problems with some offset delay, or just skip all missed problems, but then it's not fun any more, and I'd wager that the same could be done any other time of the year too...
- cbm-vic-20 8y agoI have an hour-long train commute; I was able to solve most problems in that time.
- netcraft 8y agoIt varied a lot for me. The early ones I was generally able to do in 10 minutes or less. The middle ones generally took me 30-60 minutes - or I was blocked and it took me a lot longer. The later ones generally took an hour. But - I wasn't just trying to solve them, I was also trying to write tests and refactoring when I was done - so ymmv. I also wasn't ever attempting to compete for the leaderboard.
- keithnz 8y agothey are not too bad, can get a bit more involved in the later stages ( I usually get too busy right before xmas and end up completing it after new year when I've got some time off), but I often use it as an opportunity ( like quite a few others here it seems ) to learn a new language so end up spending probably more time working out the language, because even if you solve it, you really want to make sure your code is idiomatic
- tomxor 8y agoI found foobar good for this reason... it's still time restricted but it's on your schedule not anyone else's. You get to choose when to start the next puzzle upon completing the current one - that said, the higher difficulty ones are on the order of weeks and those difficulty of puzzle can interfere with your work by filling your head.
- patrickdavey 8y ago
- keyle 8y agoAZPCS is in full swing at the moment. http://azspcs.com/ http://azspcs.com/
- rpz 8y agok/q programmers, unite!
- jerry40 8y agoHow is it going? FOr advent 2018 I use scheme but after 4 stars I think that kdb+/q actually quite suitable for such kind of tasks (at least so far). I'm not very good at it but now I'm thinking about trying to redo the exercises in it.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoYou can check out last years challenges while you wait right now. https://adventofcode.com/2017 https://adventofcode.com/2017
- Insanity 8y agoI love AoC and gladly donate to it :) I have been looking forward to it for some time now! I have also made a discord bot to show the leaderboard, if anyone is interested : https://github.com/DylanMeeus/Advent_Of_Code_Bot https://github.com/DylanMeeus/Advent_Of_Code_Bot
- karanke 8y agoComing across this for the first time, very cool! Going to do this in Scala, if anybody wants to join my email is in my bio.
- meuk 8y agoHey, maybe it's an idea if everyone who plans to do the exercises in a specific language posts a link to a github repo? Then we could compare the solutions :)
- appleiigs 8y agoIs "Dec 1st midnight" at the beginning of the day or the end of the day?
- 333c 8y agoThe beginning of the day. The 2018 page [1] has a countdown which is currently at about 11 hours remaining. [1]: https://adventofcode.com/2018 https://adventofcode.com/2018
- wodenokoto 8y agoI'm stuck on question 1. As in "I don't think I understand the question" Is there a list of frequencies I starring me in the face, that I am failing to see, which needs to apply to zero? Am I supposed to suss out the pattern for how frequency change occur as a function of current frequency from the two examples?